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SC2 on windows on Mac? How?

D

davidnssbm

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 23, 2009
173
0
I'm new to this whole windows on mac thing. I don't understand the difference between boot camp or parallel.

Also, if I figure it out, do I need windows 7? I only have XP from a long time ago.
 
Boot Camp allows you to run Windows natively, meaning at full speed and with full access to all the available hardware, thus it runs like it would on a similar specced PC.

SC 2 is a GPU heavy game, this BC is required.

Use Google or MRoogle to find thousands of guides and threads on how to install BC and Windows.

I recommend Windows XP, but Windows 7 has its advantages too.
 
I see. Thanks. But I'm not sure I understand the difference between bootcamp and parallel.

Also, just to confirm: XP will be fine to play SC2 on?
 
davidnssbm said:
I see. Thanks. But I'm not sure I understand the difference between bootcamp and parallel.
Click to expand...

Booting Windows on the Mac
  1. Characteristics of Virtualization Software
    1. Windows will run inside of a window inside of Mac OS
    2. Windows will run slower than it would run if it were running on its own - the speed of the Windows OS will be heavily dependent on the memory (RAM) inside the computer, with Windows Vista requiring more memory than Windows XP
    3. Windows will be "stored" in a file on your Mac hard drive - because of the way that virtualization works, you will be able to move files between the Windows OS and Mac OS very easily
    4. Almost all programs that work in Windows will work virtualized
    5. Almost all hardware that works in Windows will work virtualized
    6. Both VM Ware Fusion and Parallels Desktop will allow you to run windows from an installed boot camp partition (more on this below)
  2. Benefits of Using Virtualization Over Boot Camp
    1. The computer does not need to be restarted to run Windows as virtualization programs load Windows while still running Mac OS
    2. File transfer between the windows and Mac OS is, for the most part, simpler
    3. Virtualization can be combined with boot camp such that you can "pick and choose" which way you want Windows to run - either using virtualization software to run the boot camp partition or running the boot camp partition itself.
    4. If a virus is caught in the Windows partition it will be almost impossible for it to affect the Mac OS - Note: while viruses that break this rule have been demonstrated in theory, they have never been seen in the wild
    Downsides of Using Virtualization Over Boot Camp
    1. There is a noticeable speed difference that can be minimized somewhat with a lot of memory (RAM) but can not be completely overcome
    2. Windows games will be noticeably slower
    3. Some (few) programs will not work in a virtualized environment


Also, just to confirm: XP will be fine to play SC2 on?
Click to expand...

I don't know if it will play fine, but i will play. Windows 6 and 6.1 (Vista and 7) are recommended.

PC Requirements
PC Minimum System Requirements*:

Windows® XP/Windows Vista®/Windows® 7 (Updated with the latest Service Packs) with DirectX® 9.0c
2.6 GHz Pentium® IV or equivalent AMD Athlon® processor
128 MB PCIe NVIDIA® GeForce® 6600 GT or ATI Radeon® 9800 PRO video card or better
12 GB available HD space
1 GB RAM (1.5 GB required for Windows Vista®/Windows® 7 users)
DVD-ROM drive
Broadband Internet connection
1024X720 minimum display resolution​


PC Recommended Specifications:

Windows Vista®/Windows® 7
Dual Core 2.4Ghz Processor
2 GB RAM
512 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GTX or ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better​
*Note: Due to potential programming changes, the Minimum System Requirements for this game may change over time.

copied and pasted from StarCraft II System Requirements , found via "starcraft system requirements"
 
Starcraft 2 will run on the Mac. Blizzard makes their games mac and pc compatible. They have been doing this for some time now.

If your looking to install windows on your mac (I have XP via bootcamp) just to play Starcraft 2 there is no need. I just installed Starcraft 2 on my iMac, waiting for the update to finish...
 
sportster said:
Starcraft 2 will run on the Mac. Blizzard makes their games mac and pc compatible. They have been doing this for some time now.

If your looking to install windows on your mac (I have XP via bootcamp) just to play Starcraft 2 there is no need. I just installed Starcraft 2 on my iMac, waiting for the update to finish...
Click to expand...

Thanks for mentioning it, I completely forgot it in my formatting craze.


Mac Requirements
Mac Minimum System Requirements:

Mac® OS X 10.5.8, 10.6.2 or newer
Intel® Processor
NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT or ATI Radeon® X1600 or better
12 GB available HD space
2 GB Ram
DVD-ROM drive
Broadband Internet connection
1024X720 minimum display resolution​


Mac Recommended Specifications:

Intel® Core 2 Duo processor
4 GB system RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better​
 
Bootcamp = split your HD into a Windows part and a Mac part and use either or.

Parrallel = Run Mac...but with a "little Windows computer simulator" inside.

Often, games suck on Mac compared to Windows because...
1) Direct X is a Windows technology and is made for 3D graphics in games
2) Because of 1) and that 99% of gamers use windows, devs do a crap job for the Mac version (if one exists at all).
 
Mackilroy said:
It runs fine in OS X, there isn't a need to reboot into Windows.
Click to expand...

I beg to differ. The beta, and the final release runs like crap on mine when compared to my Boot Camped Windows 7 install. I'm not even running 10.6.4 either, I'm running 10.6.3. Games run better in Windows, StarCraft 2 is no exception. I just verified it myself after installing SC2 in both OSX and Windows 7.
 
Personally speaking I would always advocate running games under the Mac OS rather than Windows when the option is available unless it is completely unplayable. Aside from the obvious benefit of not having to muck about rebooting, the more games are played on the Mac OS the more chances we have of seeing more games coming over and more time taken on them.

That said I have not yet tried StarCraft 2 because the pricing for it is bonkers.
 
Bootcamp, unfortunately, is a must for SC2. I can play on high settings with shaders and lighting on medium and hit 20-40FPS. On multi or single player. I ran this under OSX and it got 1/2 the FPS on high settings and had to run it on medium.

Using the new MBP i7, HR matte. Haven't changed the ram yet.
 
Kelmon said:
That said I have not yet tried StarCraft 2 because the pricing for it is bonkers.
Click to expand...

rofl! yeah, they are milking it.

Standard is $10 more than normal and Collectors is $30 more then normal. :eek:

On the plus side, though, the review say that they actually did a really good job and you actually get decent gizmos in the collectors box. But for that price, you'd figure it'd be a metal one...

Now if Cataclysm comes out to be like $70 and $150....woah...Blizzard is getting a bit overboard.
 
rasmasyean said:
rofl! yeah, they are milking it.

Standard is $10 more than normal and Collectors is $30 more then normal. :eek:

On the plus side, though, the review say that they actually did a really good job and you actually get decent gizmos in the collectors box. But for that price, you'd figure it'd be a metal one...

Now if Cataclysm comes out to be like $70 and $150....woah...Blizzard is getting a bit overboard.
Click to expand...

Yeah they are making bank. $15/month..from 11+ million players. Holy. Freaking. Crap. Not to mention all the sales from WoW games, SC2 now and Diablo 3 on the way. Wish i could get like 3% of that...per year xD
 
johnnyfiive said:
I beg to differ. The beta, and the final release runs like crap on mine when compared to my Boot Camped Windows 7 install. I'm not even running 10.6.4 either, I'm running 10.6.3. Games run better in Windows, StarCraft 2 is no exception. I just verified it myself after installing SC2 in both OSX and Windows 7.
Click to expand...
I beg to differ. Your results are because you have an NVIDIA GPU, and Apple messed something up with 10.6.4 drivers for NVIDIA. With ATI everything is great – I get 60+ FPS with all settings on Ultra in OS X.
 
I'mAMac said:
Yeah they are making bank. $15/month..from 11+ million players. Holy. Freaking. Crap. Not to mention all the sales from WoW games, SC2 now and Diablo 3 on the way. Wish i could get like 3% of that...per year xD
Click to expand...

In some sense I think they deserved the payoff from WoW. Throughout their history, they've basically concentrated on the quality of their existing games and maintained them for a long time while most other gaming companies just release it...and forget it...for the most part. Like Battle.net is one of the best accomplishments but all they really got were mostly initial sales of games. And of course, ppl share CD keys and stuff so the real player base isn't represented by the retail figures. From my experience from Blizzard, in the past they seemed to put the "purity" of the art before the profit. But to increase the price on SC2? I guess we can blame Activision! :p
 
Mackilroy said:
I beg to differ. Your results are because you have an NVIDIA GPU, and Apple messed something up with 10.6.4 drivers for NVIDIA. With ATI everything is great – I get 60+ FPS with all settings on Ultra in OS X.
Click to expand...

Is this actually true? Would we ever expect a driver update from Apple, or do we just sorta wait til .5?
 
well I just bought the new high end i7 27" imac. will it run SC2 okay? here are the specs:

•PROCESSOR 065-9512 2.93GHZ QUAD-CORE INTELCORE I7
•MEMORY 065-9451 4GB 1333MHZ DDR3 SDRAM - 2X2GB
•HARD DRIVE 065-9454 1TB SERIAL ATA DRIVE
•GRAPHICS 065-9457 ATI RADEON HD 5750 1GB GDDR5
•OPTICAL DRIVE 065-9458 8X DOUBLE-LAYER SUPERDRIVE
 
dragonbong said:
Bootcamp, unfortunately, is a must for SC2. I can play on high settings with shaders and lighting on medium and hit 20-40FPS. On multi or single player. I ran this under OSX and it got 1/2 the FPS on high settings and had to run it on medium.

Using the new MBP i7, HR matte. Haven't changed the ram yet.
Click to expand...

I'm not saying you are wrong - performance is unquestionably better under Windows. But whether someone should care or not does sort of depend.

If you already have bootcamp up and running and already use it for gaming, well yes it's probably a no-brainer.

But if you don't have a bootcamp partition set up, playing under OSX may be a legit option. The graphical snaz is all very fine but in my case, I'm more interested in multiplayer gaming, where low graphics option are actually preferable (makes things clearer, less distractions).

Also obviously it depends on your machine. I'm running it on the iMac i7 and it plays fine with High settings under OSX.

In my own case, as all my character and campaign data is stored in the Blizzard cloud, I actually play under both Windows and OSX depending on what is running at the time I want to play :D.

NB: Oh, I should probably note - I am playing with an ATI card, and under 10.6.3 (due to the widespread graphics issues reportedly introduced in 10.6.4).
 
davidnssbm said:
well I just bought the new high end i7 27" imac. will it run SC2 okay? here are the specs:

•PROCESSOR: 2.93GHZ QUAD-CORE INTELCORE I7
•MEMORY: 4GB 1333MHZ DDR3 SDRAM - 2X2GB
•HARD DRIVE: 1TB SERIAL ATA DRIVE
•GRAPHICS: ATI RADEON HD 5750 1GB GDDR5
•OPTICAL DRIVE: 8X DOUBLE-LAYER SUPERDRIVE
Click to expand...

Those specs seem to be in compliance or even better than that with the specs I quoted earlier:

spinnerlys said:
PC Requirements

PC Minimum System Requirements*:

Windows® XP/Windows Vista®/Windows® 7 (Updated with the latest Service Packs) with DirectX® 9.0c
2.6 GHz Pentium® IV or equivalent AMD Athlon® processor
128 MB PCIe NVIDIA® GeForce® 6600 GT or ATI Radeon® 9800 PRO video card or better
12 GB available HD space
1 GB RAM (1.5 GB required for Windows Vista®/Windows® 7 users)
DVD-ROM drive
Broadband Internet connection
1024X720 minimum display resolution​


PC Recommended Specifications:

Windows Vista®/Windows® 7
Dual Core 2.4Ghz Processor
2 GB RAM
512 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800 GTX or ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better​
*Note: Due to potential programming changes, the Minimum System Requirements for this game may change over time.

copied and pasted from StarCraft II System Requirements , found via "starcraft system requirements"
Click to expand...

spinnerlys said:
Mac Requirements

Mac Minimum System Requirements:

Mac® OS X 10.5.8, 10.6.2 or newer
Intel® Processor
NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT or ATI Radeon® X1600 or better
12 GB available HD space
2 GB Ram
DVD-ROM drive
Broadband Internet connection
1024X720 minimum display resolution​


Mac Recommended Specifications:
Intel® Core 2 Duo processor
4 GB system RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better​
Click to expand...
 
nelsencaleb said:
I have heard that SC2 preforms better in bootcamp or wine or w/e mac with windows.
Click to expand...

Starcraft 2 will perform better under Windows natively (i.e. Bootcamp) than it will on OSX, due to many reasons which I won't go into right now. Windows emulation on the OSX side through wine will perform worst though.
 
Starcraft II on regular macbook?

Hi guys, I was just wondering if regular macbooks(unibody aluminum)
can run SCII or not. The recommended system requirement is bigger than
what macbooks can hold but the minimum requirement fits my macbook
Also, can I js go to bestbuy or gamespot to pick up a SCII copy
or is there a special copy for mac users?
thank you in advance!
 
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